Fourth Wing Review

 For a while, it was impossible to exist in any of the book review spaces on the internet without someone bringing up this book and praising it intensely. However, a few of my friends whose opinion I cherish have read it, and hated it. This is also the story of how I ended up adding it to my goodreads want to read list that my husband stalked in order to buy me books for my birthday. Since I had a physical copy, courtesy of my amazing husband (love you very much) I decided to see this for myself.

This is just as much of a train wreck as I expected it to be. The premise of the novel is that we follow Violet (or Violence as her enemy-to-lovers guy insists on calling her) who was supposed to be studying to be a squire get thrown into school where they will learn how to become riders or die trying. Violet has no personality beyond being small, not like other girls, has silver hair (how many times can an author remind us how special Violet is because of this) and horny to all hell. The last one I could forgive and even understand as these are very young people living in close quarters, had she had a shred of development beyond that. She is chosen by a really old dragon that everybody is surprised about, like it was not telegraphed to us from the first page that he is super special and will most definitely fall for the guy that is trying to kill her for half the book. Other characters do not fare much better in this regard. While there are some attempts to give depth to Xander (the main hot antagonist who will inevitably turn out not to be that bad) and give him a start of a redemption arc, others are not given even that. They all fall into either tropes or are unceremoniously removed from the narrative once they are done serving their purpose.

Speaking of removing, Rebecca Yarros throws young people and kills them without a seconds' hesitation, without any development or mention of them ever again. I am not sure how any reader is really expected to care for any of them, except the general understanding that a lot of young  people died. I understand that this was an attempt to raise the stakes, but it was done in such a way I was convinced Yarros did not know the first thing about running a military or a country. Picking the creme de la creme of the country and then just straight up killing them, all while there is a looming war seems like an incredibly inefficient way of running anything.

While the premise could be executed better in the hands of a more skilled author who actually knows the first thing about how books in general work, Yarros' writing style reminds me of a 14 year old who discovered sex for the first time. The characters, who we are supposed to believe are the creme de la creme of this god forsaken country, walk around horny to the point they can't get their heads out of their asses long enough to do...well anything else rather than die. In essence, writing sex scenes in fantasy is so commonplace now that I would find it weird if there were not at least a few, but the way Yarros writes them felt very uncomfortable. In terms of writing style and technique, spending all the time in Violet’s head felt like pure torture. For somebody who is supposedly very smart, Violet’s inner monologue felt super repetitive and dull after a while. The use of the word ‘badass’ so often made me want to gouge my eyes out. The only piece of world building we get is from Violet herself as she is reciting knowledge she has when she is trying to calm herself down.

On top of all of that, there were several controversies about the author herself, from claiming she was using words from Irish Gaelic, when in fact this was Scottish Gaelic- two distinct languages. Additionally, native speakers also pointed out that her attempts at pronunciation were also poor and indicated how little she truly cared about the languages she was claiming to have researched and used. She did apologize for that later and claimed she had connection to Scottish heritage, but as I am not an expert, I will not comment further.

Additionally, Yarros has been accused of being a Zionist, which considering the horrific genocide happening in Gaza, is a serious accusation. When I researched it, it does appear that Yarros has since clarified that she is against any war, but has clarified that after many accusations and call outs, so take that with a grain of salt and make your own decisions.

In the end, I found this book to be painful to get through. Writing style was immature, characters underdeveloped and relying on familiar tropes from the genre and the narrative not interesting enough to want me to know more. More sequels have come out to mixed reviews, but I am not interested and will not be reading them further at all.

This was a 1/5 for me.